CROWD FAVORITE / LABS LET’S TALK ↗ Internal tools we built because we kept running into the same gaps. Open source solutions. AI delivery workflows with the guardrails attached. A few experiments still finding their shape. This is Crowd Favorite's engineering practice with the lid off – and the front door if you want to start a conversation.
Every piece of work below started the same way: we hit the same problem on the third or fourth engagement and decided to stop solving it from scratch. Some became internal tools. Some became products. Some became open source. The shape of the toolkit tells you something about the shape of the work.
“Every enterprise team we work with has a dozen dashboards open and no single answer to 'what does it all mean?'”
Control Center pulls signal from the tools you already pay for — analytics, CRM, cloud billing, accessibility, performance — into one place, with AI doing the first pass of analysis. We deploy it as a single-tenant managed instance on your infrastructure. You own the data. We keep it running.
“Most audit tools tell you what’s broken — not what it’s costing you or how to fix it at scale.”
Our audit tool scans any URL across several dimensions such as Core Web Vitals, accessibility, privacy compliance, technology fingerprinting, and content decay. Reports are structured for two audiences: engineers who need the detail, executives who need the headline. We use it on every engagement. We’ve also made it available to anyone who wants to run their own site through it — fair warning, you’ll probably want to talk to us after.
“We didn't know we were two weeks behind until we were actually two weeks behind and even then we didn't know why.”
A daily snapshot tool that captures scheduling state across active engagements and surfaces drift while it’s still recoverable. Built for the kind of leadership work that doesn’t show up on a Gantt chart — managing six projects, three PMs, and the gap between what the plan says and what the team is actually doing.
“The right answer to 'is there a plugin for this' is sometimes 'yes, and we wrote it.'”
A suite of production plugins for enterprise WordPress: structured schema management, privacy-optimized media handling, smart llms.txt handling, filterable content grids, and accessibility-first interactive components. Open source, WordPress Coding Standards, modern PHP. Built because the alternative was either a forked plugin we couldn’t safely update or a SaaS subscription that didn’t quite fit.
“AI writes code fast. It does not, by default, write code you'd want to inherit, debug, or deploy.”
Trellis is our delivery workflow for AI-assisted engineering — the guardrails, custom skills, automated tests, and human review gates that turn fast output into shippable work. We use it on client engagements. We also help teams inside other organizations build the same kind of infrastructure for themselves, because the alternative is shipping AI-generated code with no system around it, which is how you end up rewriting it in six months.
We staff with senior architects, not contract juniors with a distant tech lead reviewing their PRs once a sprint. Our team is globally distributed across 16 time zones and deeply experienced in PHP, TypeScript, Laravel, and the cloud infrastructure it all runs on.
What that means in practice: we’ll push back on the brief if we think it’s wrong. We’ll tell you the trade-offs of every architectural choice, not just the upside. We’ll plan in detail before we write code, because the most expensive bug is the one you build into the spec. And we’ll be honest about what AI changes and what it doesn’t, because the answer is more nuanced than either "everything" or "nothing."
The named work and the work behind NDAs span the categories you’d expect from twenty years of enterprise open source plus a few you might not.
Most engagements run under NDA — these are a few we’re cleared to list.
You’ve seen some of what we’ve been making lately. This is the part where you tell us what you’re stuck on. No pitch deck, no discovery questionnaire, no first-call sales rep. Tell us what you’re trying to solve and we’ll tell you honestly whether we’re the team to help.